


A Jug of Wine

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 03:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12975000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Bucky and Steve didn’t find much of anything, but Jim spotted an entrance and Gabe mapped out an exit, and Jackie found a bar — though the “bar” was the well-stocked and well-hidden cellar of an abandoned house, which made Bucky think that Jackie had been hunting for something, but that something sure as hell wasn't an escape route.





	A Jug of Wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starmaki (themirrordarkly)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themirrordarkly/gifts).



> starmaki asked for Steve/Bucky during WW2, maybe celebrating with a stockpile of booze. And so there's a touch of angst, because it's Bucky during the war, but hopefully it's generally celebratory enough. Thank you for donating! Title is quoted from the famous, "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread --and thou!" in Omar Khayyam's The Rubaiyat.

It was Jackie who found the bar. He and Gabe had gone west while Dum Dum, Jim, and Monty went east, and Steve and Bucky circled around the plant and headed north.

Steve had wanted Bucky on the team going east. “Your eyes are better than theirs,” he’d claimed, though Jim could spot a cardinal nesting on the far side of a mountain, better eyes than any of them, he bragged, until Dum Dum shouted, "you see this, then?" and they both wound up covered in porridge and wet coffee grounds.

Steve wasn’t lying, though. Bucky’s eyes were better than Jim’s or Dum Dum’s or Monty’s because Bucky’s eyes were the ones Steve trusted best. If Bucky could find a way down to the plant from the eastern side of the forest, Steve would order them east.

But the two-day hike after Howie dropped them in Luxembourg proved that Bucky was the only Commando who could keep pace with Captain America — though Gabe insisted he could outrun them both if he wasn’t carrying the damn radio — and so it was Bucky and Steve who took the longer, circuitous route north.

Bucky wasn’t complaining. His eyes worked best when they were on Steve, and a few days without the team meant a few nights where Bucky could take Steve out for fondue.

“I’m going to kill Howard for telling you that,” Steve muttered, but Bucky was the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas when it came to _fondue_ , so it wasn’t like Steve could complain. And Bucky found he didn’t really mind having a fella with arms the size of tree trunks and everything else built to match, as long as that fella was Steve.

Bucky and Steve didn’t find much of anything, but Jim spotted an entrance and Gabe mapped out an exit, and Jackie found a bar — though the “bar” was the well-stocked and well-hidden cellar of an abandoned house, which made Bucky think that Jackie had been hunting for something, but that something sure as hell wasn't an escape route.

Captain America put up a token protest about timetables and surviving Hydra agents that might track the Howling Commandos’ rather explosive and unsubtle getaway, because “guys, you stole a tank; my neighbor Mrs. Marston has cataracts in both eyes and _she_ could follow our tracks.”

Jackie countered with a well-constructed rebuttal that took the form of a dusty wine bottle, and Captain America went into the house for glasses and surrendered the fight.

It was good wine. Monty assured them of this once they were four bottles in, and Gabe was tipsy enough to shake a bottle at Monty and announce that “good wine” was redundant, which led to a long and elaborate discussion of what constituted _bad_ wine. Jackie had a lot to say on the subject, and thankfully the Commandos had all drunk enough to believe themselves fluent in slurred French.

Bucky leaned back against the cellar wall, rested his arms over his knees and rolled the neck of his mostly empty bottle between his right finger and thumb, one eye on the wine cresting and falling with each spin of the bottle, and one eye on Steve.

It wasn’t too difficult to do both, since Steve was sprawled out in a pile of gnawed on flour sacks, close enough to slide his legs under the crook of Bucky’s left knee.

“Think they’ll remember any of this in the morning?” Steve wondered, gesturing lazily at the Commandos arguing animatedly around a cluster of oil lamps.

“Maybe the headaches will remind them,” Bucky replied, tossed his bottle over to Steve and was still a little surprised when Steve reached out and caught it, showing off reflexes that — if he’d had them a year or ten before — would have made scrawny Steve Rogers the envy of any Brooklyn team.

“You done?” Steve asked, surprised, because the Bucky of a year or five before would have been on his second bottle and loose with it, cheeks flushed and tie unknotted, out on the town and on top of the world.

Bucky shrugged. The wine had been all right, but it hadn’t -

He shook the thought away. Steve never could let go of something, even something he knew he didn’t want to know, but Bucky had learned years ago that some thoughts were better locked in the cellar and left behind.

“I can think of better things to do,” he said instead, Sgt. Barnes smirking at Captain America the way Bucky Barnes would have smirked at Steve Rogers after a few glasses of gin, pleased to see that adding two hundred pounds of muscles didn’t change the way Steve’s face went beet red.

“What?” Steve replied, cocking his eyebrow and pretending you couldn’t fry an egg on his face. “You want to do the lindy?” He batted his eyelashes at Bucky, chin tucked and looking more coquettish than Myrna Loy.

Bucky laughed. “I left my gramophone at home,” he answered, came to his feet because he’d need the second’s head start on Steve. “But I don’t know, I thought maybe we could fondue.”

Steve tackled Bucky before he’d gotten more than ten yards away. Which was all right with Bucky, because the moon was bright and the grass was soft and there was nothing better on a starry night than some good wine and a little fondue.


End file.
